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Call the Midwife, BBC One, series 2, episode 3, review

Moments of intense sisterly feelings are not rare in Call the Midwife (BBC One, Sunday) but those displayed in last night’s episode took a surreal turn as we were party to the home birth of Meg Carter. Meg gave birth to twin sisters, while her own twin sister Mave sat and watched. True to the series’s unrelenting portrayal of men as wet fish, the babies’ father waited outside and Dr Turner (Stephen McGann) cowered in the shadows as Sister Bernadette (Laura Main) helped Nurse Franklin (Helen George) heave the babies from inside a great doughy mountain of middle-aged belly.

The dual roles of Meg and Mave were played by Monica Dolan, a fantastic actress who won a television Bafta last year for her terrifying portrayal of Rose West in Appropriate Adult. Dolan did well to create Meg, a character not unlike Miss Trunchbull in Matilda who suddenly, in middle age was consumed by maternal urges. However, Meg’s more mannish sister was played with perhaps a touch too much iron-jawed relish. The angry twins owned a market stall, conspired over tarot-cards, and were adamant that the nursing profession represented all that was evil about the modern world.

Meg and Mave symbolised one of the challenges for the Fifties’ maternity nurse: an uneducated class of women still fearful of modern medicine. One of the problems with Call the Midwife, and partly why it lacks drama at times, is that the characters feel too cleanly starched, as if they have been created to illustrate a fridge magnet-like homily. In this case the message was: “Where there’s anger there’s always fear”. Not so much characters, more points of view.

That said, last night’s episode afforded many small pleasures. For one thing there’s the dialogue. “The stench of last week’s Spam is still sticking to my three-ply,” lamented Sister Monica Joan (Judy Parfitt). There are also the little jokes and the combination of gruesomeness and quaintness, like the moment when Nurse Lee (Jessica Raine) was swept off her feet. She was seconded from district practice to work in general surgery at the London Hospital, and into her ward walked old flame Jimmy (George Rainsford) – in his jimmies – clutching his tummy and making a joke about constipation. She swooned. Jimmy was soon to be married but as soon as he was discharged, he suggested “one final spin in Lady Chatterley” (the name of his Ford). Jimmy got away with this clumsy innuendo because he said it like a choirboy, with his minuscule bow-tie and his woolly waistcoat and his bad bowels. It was a hilariously unsexy prospect.

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Abbie Anker

Update: 2024-05-18